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Installation instructions

mvankeulen edited this page Oct 3, 2013 · 4 revisions

Below a few instructions for installing and starting the ECA Rule Engine.

How to download

If you are a GIT user, just "clone" this GIT repository in the usual way.

If you are not a GIT user and do not want to become one, you can download the software by clicking on "Download ZIP" on the bottom right of the Home screen. Unpack the ZIP in some location of your own choice.

How to start

Open a console window:

  1. Windows: Use the Windows "Explorer" to go to the location where you unpacked the ZIP-file. Go to the "src" directory. Type "cmd" in the address bar.

  2. Mac: Start the Terminal.app (it’s in the Applications/Utilities folder). Go to the folder where you unpacked the ZIP-file with "cd <folder>". And then "cd src".

  3. Linux: You probably already have a console windows open. Go to the folder where you unpacked the ZIP-file with "cd <folder>". And then "cd src"

Then follow the instructions for either

Tweet collections

Although the ECA Rule Engine is intended to be run from tweet collections stored in a DBMS, it currently only supports a number of built-in tweet collections (from 2010/2011 except batavierenrace which is from 2013):

  • batavierenrace (default): The "batavierenrace" is an annual estafette run between Nijmegen and Enschede in The Netherlands. The tweet collection holds the tweets collected from the 2013 edition.

  • sports: Collection of English tweets that discuss different sport events. Messages are classified to be sports by using OpenCalais. (expect some noise).

  • sr11: Serious Request 2011. Serious Request is a benefit event hosted the week before Christmas each year by Dutch radio station 3FM.

  • weer: Dutch tweets about weather forecasts. The majority of the tweets record official forecasts and others represent discussions about the weather.

  • p2000: Dutch tweets representing Alarms from the police, as reported by the P2000 system.

  • xfactor: X Factor is a British television music competition to find new singing talent, contested by aspiring singers drawn from public auditions.

You can switch to a different tweet collection by modifying dboffline.py. At the top of this file you see several "topic = '…​'" lines, one is active, the others are commented out. By simply removing the '#' in front of one these lines, you activate it. You should only have one active collection.

Prerequisites

Python 3.3

The ECA Rule Engine is known to not run under Python 2.x and Python 3.2.

Recent FireFox, Chrome, Safari browser

The Twitter Dashboard does not work on Internet Explorer, and will not until Microsoft implements so-called Server-Sent Events. The dashboard does work on Google Chrome (tested on Windows, Linux and the iPad), Firefox (tested on Windows) and Safari (tested on MacOS and the iPad). It will probably not work on (most versions of) Android, as generally speaking browsers on Android don’t support Server-Sent Events.

Working with the DUI on Mac

The Python graphical user interface called DUI may behave erratically on MacOS. This graphical user interface has been implemented using Python’s standard graphical toolkit called variously Tkinter or simply Tk. This toolkit has known issues on MacOS.